It’s admirable that
so much of Tansman’s music is now
being recorded and propagated by so
many recording companies. It’s appropriate
of course that Poland’s own Acte Préalable
should contribute to this bounty and
it does so in this very short-measure
disc devoted to Tansman’s mazurkas.

What we have here
is the long-gestated 1918-28 set of
ten mazurkas and the fourth set of
nine printed in 1941. There is an
envoi in the shape of the touching,
but resolute and no-holds-barred tribute
to Artur Rubinstein. In all this lasts
just shy of forty minutes, something
I would be remiss in not noting.

Despite his immersion
in French music Tansman was a proud
Polish composer. So, certainly, his
mazurkas owe much to the obvious figure
of Chopin. But they’re actually not
dissimilar to some of the contemporary
piano music of Martinů, whose
own Parisian residence lent his
own music an admixture of the Czech
folkloric and the French nightclub.
Whilst one doesn’t want to push the
most obvious point of this it’s true
that both these composers owed a great
deal to Roussel; Tansman actually
dedicated his first set of Mazurkas
to the French composer and Martinů
studied with him.

One could characterise
the earlier set as stylised but spiced.
There are enough harmonic twists to
lend the music a distinctive character
of its own – and it’s in no way an
emulation of Chopin. The moderato
second is pensive, the Oberek third
is a molto vivo with exciting properties.
The strong impressionist influence
on Tansman is nowhere more explicitly
realised than in the fifth and in
the seventh, a moderato, we can feel
the influence of Tasman’s older compatriot
Szymanowski. The most extrovert is
the third Oberek and the finale is
a Blues drenched Berceuse, an unusual
but actually rather effective piece
of craftsmanship.

The 1941 set is the
final set of four mazurkas that Tasman
wrote. This set of nine is, if anything,
even more concise than the early set.
Once again harmonic goldfish add colour
and darting direction to the writing
though here the idiom does seem that
much more cosmopolitan and French
than before. Debussy is surely behind
the third and fourth mazurkas. It
sounds as if the seventh were a chanson
– one can imagine words to it – but
the work is Tasman’s, a bittersweet
confection and very appealing, though
quite a long way from the Oberek.
This time the Lento postlude has Russian
hues.

The Rubinstein tribute
is rather a muscular workout written
in 1973. Tansman had composed for
the pianist before and here he doesn’t
stint the technical demands or the
faint hints, amidst the drama, of
a kind of displaced ragtime in places.

Diane Anderson has
recorded all four books of mazurkas
on Talent Dom 2910 39 but I’ve not
had access to that
recording for points of comparison.
The recording for this Acte Préalable
is rather clattery and Elżbieta
Tyszecka’s piano doesn’t always sound
the finest. And we do only have the
two books as against Talent’s four,
in a disc lasting less than forty
minutes.

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